W.E.B. Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist
(Source: Wikipedia).
At the 1900 Paris Exposition, his team made a historical display. They presented in many charts the situation of Black people in Georgia and the US in general. To draw the attention of passersby, they balanced bold aesthetics with elegant solutions for better readability.
Hi there! I'm a dataviz specialist and dev. Fullstack R as well as co-founder of BIT::Analytics.
Initially, I took on the Du Bois Challenge to hone my dataviz skills in R. Currently, I see the challenge as a way to connect to the African Diaspora around the globe. People who I don't think I would get to know otherwise. It also is a stage to bring knowledge to people and promote Social Justice.
Moreover, I'm always left in awe by the small tricks that the Du Bois team used to solve visualization problems. The fan chart is an intuitive comparison tool, while the spirals are a compact way to show huge differences in data.
The timelessness of Du Bois' posters provoked
Anthony Starks,
Allen Hillery,
Sekou Tyler and
Chimdi Nwosu to create and mantain the
#DuBoisChallenge. The proposal was to reproduce Du Bois posters with any tools whatsoever. So, I chose
ggplot2 and its many extensions. Furthermore, I used this opportunity to present data on racial inequality and Black achievements in my homeland, Brazil.
Brazil's approach to racial declaration diverges from the US in two major points: Race is self-declared, and Afro-Brazilians are divided into "pretos" and "pardos". I aggregated these two groups into one in this work.
